Population Increase
by Socks-With-Stripes
Summary: Seven-year-old Annabeth realizes she does not know how babies are made, and Luke and Thalia are determined to be entirely unhelpful as she tries to find the answer. But this is no laughing matter. This is a life, or non-life situation.


_I know, I know... I said this account was only for _Avoiding Cliches Like the Plague_, but I figured I might as well submit one story. But this is it! The only other thing I'm ever going to post on this account!_

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><p>At first glance, nobody would have noticed anything odd about the girl sitting on the grass. She looked like every other seven-year-old in Central Park that day, the sun bouncing off her blonde curls, a look of content spread across her face. However, the more observant person would probably notice that the book she held in her hands was not a <em>Magic Tree House<em> book, but in fact _Moby Dick_.

The girl (who's name was Annabeth) had not been brought to the park by her parents. She had not seen her father for five months. At that particular moment, he was in a bookstore in Chicago, trying to find a specific book about airplanes from World War II. He wasn't having much luck. Annabeth's mother, (whom she had never met) was in a town near Scotland called Durham, where she was attempting to uncover an underground system of tunnels used by dogs, hedgehogs, mailmen, and a few escaped leopards. Unlike Annabeth's father, she was doing very well with her project.

The next closest things Annabeth had to family were in the park with her. Luke, a fourteen-year-old thief and _Oasis_ addict, as well as Thalia, the twelve-year-old punk who could zap you with lightning if you got too close. When they had first met, Annabeth had constantly pestered Thalia about how her powers worked. But seeing as the answer was always "they just do," Annabeth quickly gave up. All three children knew that the smartest thing to do would be to go to Camp Half-Blood, a safe haven for demigods like themselves. However, Luke, Thalia, and Annabeth rarely did the smartest thing, preferring to take a more exciting path instead.

Annabeth considered herself to be an intelligent person. She connected patterns that no one else did, and she'd outwitted Thalia and Luke on various occasions. Despite being dyslexic, she was reading books that were much more advanced than what other seven-year-olds were reading. At first when she had run away from home, she had been worried that without school she would stop learning and become stupid. However, Annabeth quickly learned that there's much more to learn from experience than from school.

As Annabeth sat under a tree in the park, reading her book on that beautiful spring day, something dawned on her. A fact that she didn't know, and, to her surprise, had never really thought about before: how do people make babies?

She knew that babies grew inside people. That much she had learned in the nine months before her little brothers had been born. But exactly how the babies got in – and out – of a woman was never quite clear to Annabeth.

Annabeth put down her book and thought. She considered several options, (Did a woman just think really hard until a baby appeared inside her or something?) but none of them made much sense. And the more she thought about it, the more Annabeth realized that she had absolutely no idea how babies were created, or why men were necessary at all. She hated the feeling of not knowing something. So, faced with this problem, she decided to take the question to the highest authority around: Luke.

Being the oldest, Annabeth figured Luke would know the answer. Only grown ups could have babies, and Luke was just a few years away from being a grown up, after all. Annabeth grabbed her book, stood up, wiped the dirt and grass off her hands, and went to search for Luke.

She found him next to a duck pond. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside their bags, alternating between sips of Pepsi, (which Annabeth was sure he had acquired under questionable legality) and throwing twigs into the pond. Every so often, one of the twigs would bounce off a duck, which would then honk and fly to the other side of the pond.

"Luke?" Annabeth sat down next to the messy haired teenager and curled her legs up to her chest.

"Hey, Annabeth," Luke said. He threw another twig. It hit a duck on the head. "Any ideas for dinner? There's that little convenience store over there, wouldn't be too hard to pick something up. So long as we're not the only ones there. Sound good?"

Annabeth paused, then took a deep breath. Luke gave her a funny look and took a swig of Pepsi. She felt ashamed that she had to ask him something so simple. So much for her reputation of being the smart one. But she had to find out. The nagging feeling wouldn't go away until she knew.

"Luke, how do people make babies?" Annabeth had expected Luke to laugh at her, or roll his eyes, or tell her that her scholarship was going down the drain. What she hadn't expected was for him to spit out all his Pepsi and turn beet red. He looked at the ground and fiddled with the bottle containing the remainder of his drink.

"I, uh, it's – it's complicated, okay? It's not really… well, you, um, you're kinda, yeah," Luke stuttered. Annabeth raised her eyebrows.

"You don't know?" She asked. Luke looked mortified, but the his face still hadn't returned to it's natural colour.

"No, no, I do," he said desperately, "It's just, it's kinda, um, well… you know what? It's a girl thing. Go ask Thalia." He went back to tossing sticks into the pond.

"Okay," Annabeth got up and walked away from Luke to where Thalia was sitting. _A girl thing_… well, that was probably true. After all, it was the girl who had the baby inside her.

Thalia was lying under an enormous oak tree with her feet propped up on the trunk. Dissected leaves covering her stomach and she held a ripped one was in her hands. She looked at Annabeth, upside down.

"What's up?" Thalia said, turning around and sitting up so she could look Annabeth in the face. Annabeth prepared for the second time to ask the question. And in front of _Thalia _this time, how humiliating.

"How do people make babies?"

Like Luke, Thalia turned very red. She looked at Annabeth like she had just said, _Can we dump some live puppies into a meat grinder?_ which didn't make any sense, considering babies were much nicer than dead puppies.

"How – how do _people_ make _babies_? You don't know? I, um, I – Okay, just – just go ask Luke. He's older, he can answer this stuff." Thalia stumbled over the sentences. Annabeth was not impressed.

"Luke told me to ask you," she said.

"Well, too bad for him. I'm not telling you anything," Thalia flopped back onto the grass and closed her eyes. After nudging the girl with her toe a few times and getting no reaction, Annabeth decided to take the advice and try Luke again.

She sat down directly in front of him, so he had no choice but to look at her. Luke sighed.

"She didn't tell you did she?"

"Nope. She said to come ask you, 'cause you're older." Annabeth said. Luke rolled his eyes.

"You really want to know?" He gave her a doubtful look.

"Yeah."

"Completely sure?"

"_Yes_, Luke I really want to know. I'm not stupid." Annbeth glared at him. Luke gave in, swearing under his breath. Annabeth had quickly learned there was no point in trying to stop him. It would probably take the same amount of effort as digging the New York City subway by hand, and he had already proven that you could, in fact, staple Jello to a tree. Luke took a deep breath and looked up at the sky.

"So, uh, the guy has a… thing. And so does the girl. And they, um, put them… together. Got it?" He said all this in a rush and then looked back down at her. Annabeth was confused, but she nodded anyway and waited for him to go on. He didn't.

"Okay, so you don't get it." Luke looked down and started pulling apart a blade of grass. "Let's see… uh, okay here. People make babies with sex." He looked her in the eye. Annabeth nodded slowly. Luke seemed relieved.

"What's that?" Annabeth asked. Luke's relief disappeared and was replaced by panic.

"It's… it's… you know what? Look it up on the internet," he said,

"We don't have a computer."

"Oh, right. Um, okay, I think there's a library around here somewhere. They'll have a computer we can use," Luke jumped to his feet. He grabbed Annabeth's hands and pulled her up with him. Shouldering his and Thalia's bags, Luke led her out of the park, past a small café, past a store selling incredibly tiny clothes, through a building full of people in fancy suits, and finally into the library, a structure that seemed to be made almost entirely of glass. Annabeth immediately admired for it's sophisticated, streamlined appearance.

On the inside, the library was cool and quiet. Luke and Annabeth stuck out like sore thumbs with their tattered clothes and ragged bags, but no one spared them a second glance. Annabeth sat down at the nearest computer and opened an internet window. Luke wandered over to the romance section on the other side of the library. This was odd, considering Luke wasn't a huge fan of books, or romance stories. But Annabeth didn't care. The internet was sure to give her a much better explanation than Luke and Thalia had…

Luke heard Annabeth's shriek from across the library, which meant that the library carried sound very well, and also that Annabeth had clearly just discovered what sex was. He winced at the idea of having to read something like that at the age of seven, but still, it wasn't like _he _was about to explain it, and Thalia certainly wasn't helping. Luke sprinted back to the computers and found Annabeth curled up in a ball on the floor next to the computer she'd been using.

"Come _on_," he said, feeling horribly guilty, "we have to get out of here now, or they're going to kick us out, or call the cops, or something."

Annabeth stood up, but only reluctantly. She would have been perfectly happy to lie on that carpeted floor forever and just forget what she had read. As they left the library, Annabeth walked a little further from Luke than she normally would have. He was a _boy,_ he could do… stuff.

When they reached the duck pond, Annabeth collapsed on the ground several feet away from Luke and covered her head with her bag.

"So you get it now?" Luke asked her, half worried, half amused. Annabeth pushed the bag off her face and rolled over to face him.

"That is so… so…" For once, Annabeth was at a loss for words. "Gross," she finished, "I'm _never_… it's so, so, so, so _gross_!"

Luke laughed beside her. Annabeth glared at him. How could he find this whole thing funny? It was terrible.

"Well," Luke said, "you could always be a lesbian."

"What's that?" Annabeth asked, her curiosity returning.

"Never mind."

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><p><em>Because then Annabeth would ask Over 9000! questions that Luke would not want to answer. I know Annabeth's not stupid, but she didn't really have a great relationship with her dad and stepmom. She probably would have been more concerned with running away than how babies are made. Plus she's a brain child or whatever. And that's it! Only story you'll ever read from me (on fanfiction, anyway) so I hope you enjoyed it!<em>

_Characters belong to Rick Riordan. Central Park belongs to New York City._


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